SOVIET VOTERS DEAL HUMILIATING BLOW TO PARTY OFFICIALS

The Soviet electorate has dealt a mortifying rebuke to the high and mighty in elections for a new national congress, including stunning upsets of a Politburo member and several other senior Communist Party officials who ran without opposition.

Results piling up today from the freest nationwide elections since 1917 showed that the Mayor and the second-ranking Communist official of Moscow, the Communist Party leader in Leningrad, the commander of the Northern Fleet, the President and Premier of Lithuania, the Estonian K.G.B. chief, the commander of Soviet troops in East Germany and other prominent officials were defeated by candidates promising more rapid change.

The elections on Sunday, for the new and theoretically powerful Congress of People's Deputies, swept in a substantial minority of independent candidates, planting the seeds of the first national opposition since the time of Lenin. No Verdict on the Party

The results were not a rejection of the Communist Party as such - many of the winners viewed as champions of change were Communists - but they were a disavowal of party members seen as unenthusiastic about the program of economic and political revival undertaken by Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet leader.

The popular sentiment against the old guard was so strong that in Leningrad, Yuri F. Solovyev, the regional Communist Party leader and a nonvoting member of the ruling Politburo, was reportedly defeated even though he was the only candidate on the ballot. This came about, as Leningrad radio and television journalists explained it, because enough voters crossed Mr. Solovyev's name off the ballots to deny him the required majority, forcing a new election.

The same humiliation befell both the Communist Party leader, Konstantin I. Masik, and the Mayor, Valentin A. Zgursky, in Kiev, the third-largest Soviet city, and Yakov P. Pogrebnyak, head of the Lvov regional committee in the western Ukraine, as well as other Ukrainian officials, according to the official press agency Tass. Discreet Discontent in Tomsk

Even in the Siberian city of Tomsk, not known as a hotbed of unrest, a majority of voters crossed out the name of the unopposed party leader, Vadim I. Zorkaltsev, a protege of the Politburo member Yegor K. Ligachev, the Government newspaper Izvestia said tonight.

None of these officials will lose the job he already holds, but the defeat nonetheless stands as a vote of no confidence by the public.

Mr. Gorbachev has said several times that the party would take into account poor showings in elections when considering the future of Communist officials, warning that those rejected or heavily opposed by the public cannot count on keeping their party posts indefinitely.

Aside from Mr. Solovyev, three other Politburo members, including the Ukrainian party leader, Vladimir V. Shcherbitsky, ran in uncontested elections, but the results of those races were not available. #89 Percent for Yeltsin In Moscow, Boris N. Yeltsin, the deposed city party chief, won with a landslide of 89 percent over a candidate backed by the local party machine, Yevgeny A. Brakov, the director of the Zil limousine factory.

Where ethnic consciousness was the issue, it proved a compelling political force.

The victors included most of the candidates who campaigned for greater autonomy in the Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, including some candidates who favor the secession of their republics from the Soviet Union.

The Lithuanian movement Sajudis claimed victories for 32 of the republic's 42 seats, with 8 others forced into runoffs.

Sajudis (pronounced SAH-you-dis) withdrew its challenges to the No. 1 and No. 2 Lithuanian party leaders, who are regarded as relatively sympathetic to the demands for greater independence, but at least six other top Lithuanian officials fell to Sajudis.

The Latvian Communist leader, Jan Vagris, withstood a nationalist challenge with a bare 51 percent against a candidate from a fringe group, the National Independence Movement. Supporters of the independence candidate asserted that the margin of victory came from navy ballots collected in the Baltic fleet, based in Riga. Tables Turned in Moldavia

There was also a kindling of regional consciousness in tiny Moldavia, where six radicals from the writers' union were all elected and a major establishment figure, the ideologist Aleksandr Zhuchenko, chief of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, was beaten.

In the Ukraine, Ivan F. Drach, a poet and organizer of a Popular Front group, placed second in a field of seven candidates, but Ukrainian nationalists consoled themselves that the winner, a Kiev surgeon, had strongly endorsed the Popular Front.

One of the most startling upsets came in the northern Russian city of Yaroslavl, where Gen. Boris V. Snetkov, commander of Soviet forces in East Germany, lost to a lieutenant colonel who called for ''radical reform'' of the military, including abolition of the draft.

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The military commanders of Moscow and Leningrad and the commander of the Northern Fleet in Murmansk all fell to civilian challengers. What Total Effect? It was impossible to tell from the partial results trickling in today how large an independent bloc - or how potentially united - would emerge in the new congress.

Election officials do not expect a full list of deputies to be published until April 5, and that will not include several races where runoffs or new elections are required.

Voters in many of the 1,500 districts that voted Sunday were offered only a single candidate, and many more faced a choice between two candidates similarly unthreatening to the status quo.

''The main thing is not the quantity of independent deputies, but the fact itself,'' said Roy A. Medvedev, a Marxist historian restored to official favor less than a year ago. Mr. Medvedev came in first among six candidates in a Moscow district and faces a runoff on April 9. Yeltsin Looking for Allies

The winners in Moscow's 27 election districts include a number of potential members of an informal independent bloc. Mr. Yeltsin told Reuters today that he was examining the election returns from different regions in search of possible allies in the new congress.

The deputies include some winners who hold prominent official positions but have made reputations as outspoken free thinkers. Among them were Telman Gdlyan, a national prosecutor who gained fame combating high-level corruption and organized crime; Aleksei M. Yemelyanov and Oleg T. Bogomolov, economists who have pressed for more rapid progress toward free markets, and either Gennadi K. Ashin, a political scientist, or Yuri D. Chernichenko, a crusading journalist, who face a runoff election against each other.

Other successful candidates ran as outsiders and are more openly oriented toward Western politics. They include Arkady N. Murashev, who called during a television debate for a multiparty political system, and Ilya Y. Zaslavsky, a 29-year-old invalid who overcame a campaign with strong anti-Semitic overtones. Sergei S. Stankevich, a leader of an independent Moscow political club, took 49 percent of the vote in a four-candidate race and is given a good chance in the runoff. Still a Party Majority

The election results are scattered and incomplete, leaving open some interesting questions, such as whether an independent candidate in any of the districts lost to a candidate supported by the party machine.

Whatever quasi-opposition emerges will presumably be fractious, and will surely be outnumbered by candidates beholden to the Communist Party leadership.

The four-month-old constitutional amendments under which the elections were conducted gave the party an extra margin of security by reserving 750 places of 2,250 for mainstream official groups, including the party itself.

Moreover, the party will have another opportunity to filter out potential opponents when its 2,250 members pick 542 of themselves for a standing legislature, where most of the lawmaking is to take place. Where It Leaves Gorbachev

The more independent candidates have, almost without exception, pledged their loyalty to Mr. Gorbachev and his program of political and economic change.

The Soviet leader may thus use his new parliament - which he is expected to head from the newly enhanced post of President - to push his program faster than hard-liners the party would like.

But Mr. Gorbachev may also find that a free-thinking legislature will make his life more difficult, with some nationalist deputies threatening to bolt from the Soviet Union and reformers impatient for more radical change than even he wants.

The best known of the victorious candidates in Sunday's elections, Mr. Yeltsin, fell from Mr. Gorbachev's favor because he became impatient with change, and Mr. Gorbachev on election day pointedly warned against ''great leaps.''

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A version of this article appears in print on March 28, 1989, on Page A00001 of the National edition with the headline: SOVIET VOTERS DEAL HUMILIATING BLOW TO PARTY OFFICIALS. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe